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Article Excerpt
These reflections are a response to a 2005 Social Work article by Mimi Abramovitz that examines the impact of welfare reform on the working lives of frontline workers in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and describes the difficult conditions under which these human services workers perform. Although Abramovitz's article is excellent as far as it goes, it does not, out of scholarly caution, make any suggestions or recommendations about how the difficulties encountered by the workers she describes can best be mitigated. Here, I suggest that practitioner training in certain key managerial skills might help to soften the impact of the difficult working conditions Abramovitz describes.
DEALING WITH WORKER DEMORALIZATION
Before my retirement in 2000, I spent almost 30 years working in the Veterans Administration Health Care Center in Palo Alto, California, as a member of a large social work department (about 60 social workers spread among at least a dozen programs, both outpatient and inpatient). Our chief, John Wax (1922-2000), devoted many hours in staff meetings, seminars, and individual supervisory sessions to helping us learn to successfully engage, modify, and eventually change the heavily bureaucratic service culture in which we found ourselves. He inculcated and developed staff" leadership skills through his administrative teaching, organizing, consulting, and mentoring. Because this training proved an effective antidote to the stifling working conditions then current in the Veterans Administration, I feel it might be of interest to present my experiences to a wider audience. Although the setting in which I was employed was not a TANF program, I believe the working conditions that existed then present enough similarities to the programs described by Abramovitz to warrant an...
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